Embodiments of the present invention relate to a method and apparatus for identifying origin/destination pairs.
In many services, it is needed to collect information about an origin/destination pair. For example, integrated circuit (IC) cards have been widely applied in public transportation services such as bus and subway. In use, a user has to swipe card at a start station (origin) and a destination station (destination) so as to generate origin/destination pair information. Based on such pair information, various operations such as charging, route statistics and analysis may be performed to the user. For another example, in expressway management, electronic road pricing (ERP) is also required to provide an intelligent traffic management based on origin/destination pair information. For example, in a parking management, information about checking in/out of a parking lot should generally be required to record, which may also be regarded as a kind of origin/destination pair information.
However, during actual use, due to technical reasons such as IC card fault, POS machine fault, and communication fault, as well as artificial reasons such as subjective negligence, etc., loss of origin or destination information might be incurred. In this case, it will cause service failure. For example, in a public transportation system, when a user swipes card at the destination, if the origin information is lost, agate at a terminal will not be opened. Traditionally, this problem needs to be solved in a manual manner, which will bring various inconveniences to the user per se, other users and the service provider, particularly at rush time of the service. The same problem also exists in other services such as an ERP service and a parking management service.